HootSuite, the social media dashboard and analytics tool, has reached a new milestone: 2 million users.

Invoke Media released HootSuite in December 2008 and it is widely used by individuals as well as organizations, governments and businesses. The White House, SXSW, Zappos and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia all use HootSuite, according to the company.

HootSuite hit the 1 million-user milestone in November 2010. Consumers and businesses have shared some 500 million messages to date.

The company shares some other statistics about its growth in a blog post.

You’d think a long summer holiday weekend would be bereft of news, but not this year. The 4th of July started with a bang this weekend, with plenty to enjoy right here at Mashable.

Google dominated the news landscape with its new social network, and we covered that from a variety of angles. Meanwhile, crazy stuff was going on and we have video, including the two cutest babies in the world.

In case you were busy grilling, enjoying the outdoors or taking in a 4th of July parade, we put together this helpful list of all the things you missed:

Facebook is actively trying to block Facebook Friend Exporter, a Google Chrome extension that lets you export the list and contact info of your Facebook friends for use in other services, the extension developer Mohamed Mansour claims.

“Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. (The extension) will no longer work for many people”, Mansour wrote on the extension’s homepage.

The Facebook Friend Exporter is a simple tool that lets you grab phone numbers, e-mails and other data from your Facebook friends, and directly import them into Google Contacts. The current version doesn’t work anymore, but the author promises to build and maintain new version that uses a different design.

CNET, however, notes that the tool is probably against Facebook’s Terms of Service, which states: “you will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”

Google, an online giant but a heavy underdog in the social networking race, has taken the opposite stance, having recently launched Takeout, a tool that lets you export all your data from various Google services.

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

The back-and-forth between brand reps who manage Twitter accounts and people who try to communicate with those brands might become a little less complicated. It seems no longer will verified Twitter accounts be required to follow back the Twitter users who want to send direct messages.

The Next Web is reporting that Twitter is easing up on the follow requirement so that users with a verified account won’t have to follow a user who wants to message them, ask for a direct message and later unfollow them after the communication has ended.

This makes a lot of sense to us. Consumers increasingly turn to Twitter to communicate with brand reps for assistance — for instance, trying to rebook a flight after a snowstorm. But the process of @messaging, following, requesting a DM and later unfollowing is unnecessarily convoluted for accounts that are designed to handle customer service issues.

Twitter hasn’t announced whether this option will be rolling out across the board, but it appears to have gone into affect for Tata DOCOMO, an Indian mobile operator. The company tweeted,”Now to DM us all you need to do is follow @tatadocomo. No need for us to follow you first. Tested and its working.”